Monday, June 11, 2012

Luxembourg-headquartered synthetic diamond supermaterials
manufacturer, Element Six has employed its chemical vapor deposition
(CVD) grown single crystal synthetic diamond to facilitate a quantum bit
to exhibit memory coherence greater than one second at room
temperature.

This places synthetic diamonds at an advantage over rival materials
as no other material has been able to exhibit such long duration of
memory at room temperature and without complex infrastructure such as
cryogenic cooling.
The quantum electron spin can be likened to the two states of a bar
magnet with 1 denoting “up” and 0 denoting “down”. In quantum mechanics,
the quantum bit (qubit) can represent both 1 and 0 simultaneously. This
property forms the basis of quantum computing and can be extended to
other magnetic sensing applications. The quantum information processing
using synthetic diamond consists of controlling the atomic sized
impurities.
Element Six has created synthesis processes, which are characterized
by impurity control in the range of parts per trillion. The
nano-engineering controlled CVD growth of synthetic diamonds is the
result of collaborative research between Harvard University, Max-Planck
Institute for Quantum Optics and California Institute of Technology. The
study, which is termed as the quantum information research
collaboration, focused on developing a synthetic diamond with only one
specific impurity or defect called the Nitrogen Vacancy centre. The N-V
centre can be spin polarized at room temperature using a green light
source and its state can be read out using existing techniques before
quantum de-coherence takes place.
While the finding paves the path for future advancement in quantum
communications, they have near term applications in quantum sensor
technologies at the nanoscale for chemical and biological imaging
processes.